Until Fools Find Gold (Providence Gold 1)

So, Levi and Noah had both taken me to the hospital, and we’d been relieved to find out I didn’t have any long-lasting or life-altering injuries. There were some old ones that were just visible, but again they weren’t life-changing.

Since then, I’d had a constant chaperone. I was passed between the members of the family, but my regular ones were Levi and Noah.

This wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for the fact that being around Noah drove me crazy.

I wanted him.

I didn’t want to want him.

I wanted him to want me.

I’d walked around with a fake smile on my face for years and hadn’t thought twice about doing it. I’d hated my father even more for the situation and not being able to beg people to help me get away from him, sure, but I’d been doing it for most of my life by then. It was second nature.

This wasn’t.

I was tired of constantly having to smile when all I wanted to do was throw myself at his feet and cling on like a howler monkey. Did they cling on to people?

I padded back into the kitchen to see my best friend at the counter getting himself set for our walk to work.

“Yo,” he shouted, even though I was only a couple of feet away from him in the kitchen.

Sighing, I tapped him on the shoulder making him shriek and spin around to face me while holding his chest.

“What the shit? You scared the Jesus out of me,” he rambled out so quickly that it almost came out as one word.

“I scared the Jesus out of you?”

Shrugging, he turned back toward the coffee machine and continued pouring. “I could have Jesus in me.”

Leaning back against the counter, I picked up the cup of coffee I’d left there while I went to find my sunglasses. Really, there was no missing the cup and the steam rising from it, so his overreaction was even crazier. That was Levi though, and it was one of the many reasons why we all loved him as much as we did.

“What were you so delicately yo-ing at me for?”

“We need to head out after we finish these,” he lifted his cup in my direction, before bringing it back and taking a big gulp out of it.

During the day, the family either traveled to their oil machinery thingy’s, or they worked from the office building on the property. They’d explained the whole oil drills or whatever they were called to me many times over the years - and many times over the last couple of months - but I’d be damned if any of it made any sense or stuck in my head.

Since I’d arrived, I’d taken on the task of being the ‘administrative assistant’ for Noah and Levi. Basically, I filed, I wrote documents, I did all the administrative shit that needed to be done, apart from answering the phones– that I wasn’t allowed to do, just in case.

Finishing the last of my coffee, I rinsed out the mug and put it in the dishwasher.

Levi was a coffee freak of nature. The guy would drink the coffee while it was boiling hot, not even wincing or screaming. If it got below a certain level of lava temperature, he’d stick it in the microwave until it reached magma temps again, and then drink it. The rest of us would have been peeling off the burned roof of our mouths or sucking on ice cubes, but he didn’t even notice it. This meant that as soon as my cup was in the dishwasher, his followed it and we were making our way out of the door.

Halfway there, we bumped into Ariana, his sister who was younger than him by a year. Archer was the oldest at twenty-seven, then came Noah who was twenty-five. Tate, the drunken accident, was twenty-two. And, because they hadn’t learned from the previous three mistakes, their parent’s exact words, along came Levi and Ariana a year apart at twenty-one and twenty years old. Tate literally had been the drunken accident, and his dad Jer swore that was why he was as… unique as he was.

Ariana hadn’t changed in all the years I’d known her. She loved gaming and was a complete nerd, but you’d never guess it when you looked at her. Sadly, there was a stereotypical image of a gamer, be they male or female, but there were no glasses or Cheetos stains on this chick. She wasn’t skinny, she was curvy and tall with hair that reached near her bra strap. She was so freaking graceful too, and the sweetest thing about her was– she had no clue how beautiful she was.

Was she classically beautiful? No. She was unique in every way– the perfect definition of a Townsend if ever there was one.